1837 Land Cession Treaties with the Ojibwe & Dakota

Chippewa signed July 29, 1837 at present-day Mendota, MNSioux signed September 29, 1837 in Washington, D. C.

The first major land cessions by Dakota and Ojibwe people in
what is now Minnesota coincided with the collapse of the fur
trade. New owners of the American Fur Company – Ramsay
Crooks, Henry Sibley and Hercules Dousman, with the Chouteau family of St. Louis – and other traders
changed their business strategy from trading for furs to making
treaties. They used powerful connections in the U.S. political
system to ensure that when Dakota and Ojibwe people received
compensation for ceded land, much of the cash would be used to
pay fur trade debts.

The Dakota in their 1837 treaty received $16,000 in cash and
goods up front, and promises of up to $40,000 per year for years
to come. Their “relatives and friends” received $110,000, and fur
traders received $90,000 in debt payments.

The Ojibwe received $24,000 in cash, goods and services,
retaining rights to use the land for hunting, fishing and other
purposes. Their mixed-blood relatives (including men who
signed treaties on behalf of the U.S.) received $100,000; and fur
traders received $70,000. Traders William Aitkin, Lyman Warren, and Hercules Dousman are mentioned by name as
intended recipients of debt payments.

The fur trade was not the only business interest at work in these
treaties. The Ojibwe treaty, called the "White Pine Treaty,"
transferred millions of acres of timber to the U.S.:

Officials in the administration of President Martin Van
Buren sought the land cession not to accommodate white
settlers – whites were not demanding Chippewa land –
but to enable lumbering on a large scale.

—Ronald N. Satz, Chippewa Treaty Rights

The cession of pine forests led to abuses of Ojibwe timber rights
for a century, as treaty signers Dousman, Warren, and Sibley– as well as many other powerful political figures – suddenly widened
their business interests from the fur trade to timber. Ojibwe
negotiators made it clear, however, that they were retaining
rights to deciduous trees in the region (among other rights),
going so far as to lay an oak leaf in front of U.S. negotiator Henry
Dodge to clarify their point. In fact, extensive evidence indicates
that the Ojibwe believed they were merely leasing use of the pine
forests, and many refused to leave the ceded territory, preferring
to stay and exercise the rights to land use that they retained in the
treaty. An important US Supreme Court ruling in 1999 upheld
those rights. (See Treaty of 1855.)

Another factor in the Ojibwe treaty was the reported presence of
copper deposits in the ceded territory. Henry Dodge, the US
treaty commissioner and later governor of Wisconsin, had made
a fortune in lead mining and particularly noted the presence of
mineral deposits in preparation for the treaty.

Signers of the Dakota Treaty

Family Members

Lawrence Taliaferro
John F. A. Sanford
John Emerson

Taliaferro, Emerson, and Sanford

Lawrence Taliaferro, long-time Indian agent at Fort Snelling, signed seven US-Indian treaties, including the 1837 treaties at which Ojibwe and Dakota people made the first large land cessions in what is now Minnesota, and the multinational treaty at Prairie du Chien in 1825.

Taliaferro was related to other treaty signers through two partnerships:

• While at Fort Snelling, Taliaferro married a woman who, according to many sources, was a daughter of Cloud Man, a Dakota signer of the Sisseton Wahpeton treaty of 1851.
• As a slaveholder, Taliaferro “owned” Harriet Robinson, and officiated at Harriet’s marriage to Dred Scott. Dred Scott, in turn, was the slave of two signers of US-Indian treaties: brothers-in-law John Emerson and John F. A. Sanford.

Emerson was a surgeon at Fort Snelling in the 1830’s, and signed the 1837 Ojibwe treaty that ceded land in what is now Minnesota. Fur trader Sanford signed three treaties with the Kansa, Sauk and Fox in the 1820s and 1830s. He married into the powerful Chouteau family of St. Louis. (Through family and business partnerships with William Clark, John Jacob Astor, Henry Sibley and many others, the Chouteau family virtually ran the fur trade west of the Mississippi.)

Family Members

Solomon Sibley
Charles Trowbridge
Henry H. Sibley
Frederick Sibley

Sibley and Trowbridge

One of the first acts of Congress under the Constitution was to “privatize” westward expansion. In 1787, a corporation called the Ohio Company of Associates was given land to settle in Ohio, with the idea that companies could sell land to settlers more aggressively and efficiently that the government could. With this act, corporate interests became a driving force in the US acquisition of Indian land.

The second-in-command for the Ohio Company was Ebenezer Sproat, whose daughter Sarah married Solomon Sibley. Sarah and Solomon moved from the Ohio settlement to what is now Michigan, where Solomon became the first mayor of Detroit and engaged in land speculation, signing a treaty with the Ottawa in 1821.

Solomon and Sarah had two sons and a son-in-law who signed US-Indian treaties:

• Henry Sibley, co-owner of the American Fur Company, business partner of the Chouteau family from St. Louis, military general and Governor of Minnesota, land speculator, owner of a gold mining company, etc., signed 10 treaties including the 1837 treaty at which the Ojibwe first ceded land in what is now Minnesota.
• Frederick Sibley, a fur trader, army contractor and inheritor of a lucrative limestone quarry and other real estate in Detroit, signed the 1851 Mdewakanton Wahpekute treaty by which the Dakota ceded 16,000,000 acres to the US.
• Charles C. Trowbridge, a banker, lawyer, lumber manufacturer and Indian agent who played a prominent role in US-Indian affairs in Michigan, signed a treaty with eastern Ojibwe in 1820 and the multinational treaty at Prairie du Chien in 1825.

Another brother-in-law of Henry Sibley was Franklin Steele, who controlled the water power at St. Anthony Falls.

Family Members

Hercules Dousman
Scott Campbell
A. J. Cambell

Dousman and the Campbells

The Campbell siblings were children of a British fur trader and a Dakota woman. Some sources say that their grandmother was a sister of Little Crow, but which Little Crow is unclear. (The name was carried by generations of men.) Antoine Campbell signed the Dakota treaties of 1858). Scott Campbell was a long-time interpreter for Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro, and signed the multinational treaties at Prairie du Chien in 1825 and 1830, treaties with the Dakota in 1836 and 1837, and the Ojibwe land cession treaty of 1837.

Their sister Margaret had a long relationship with Hercules Dousman, who began working for the American Fur Company in 1826. By 1834, when Astor sold the company, Dousman was in a position to become a major stockholder in the fur trade, in partnership with the Chouteau family of St. Louis and Henry Sibley. Often working in tandem with Sibley, Dousman diversified his business interests as the fur trade declined, amassing a fortune through steamboats, land speculation, timber, and railroads. All of these businesses required obtaining the assets of American Indian people, and Dousman pursued his interests by signing treaties with the Ojibwe in 1837, with the Ho-Chunk in 1846, and with the Dakota in 1836 and 1851. In this last treaty, traders such as Dousman asserted their own interests so aggressively that he later said, “The Sioux treaty will hang like a curse over our heads for the rest of our lives.”

Two of Scott Campbell’s sons were hung for their involvement in the Dakota War of 1862: Baptiste, by the US military in Mankato; and John, by a lynch mob. Their fate stands in stark contrast to the financial benefits gained from US-Indian relations by their uncle Hercules.

Family Members

Schoolcraft, Aitkin, Warren

Henry Schoolcraft, who signed the 1825 multinational treaty at Prairie du Chien and 8 other Ojibwe treaties, first made a name for himself as a mineralogist, identifying copper and lead deposits. In 1819 he wrote a book entitled Lead Mines of Missouri that drew the attention of Lewis Cass, Michigan Territorial Governor. The next year, on an expedition with Cass, Schoolcraft bribed local Ho-Chunk men to show him the location of lead mines in the Prairie du Chien area. He was then appointed the head US Indian agent for all of the vast Michigan Territory. He appointed his brothers and brothers-in-law to positions in the Indian Affairs bureaucracy, and they signed Ojibwe treaties in what is now Michigan.

Schoolcraft's first wife was a member of a prominent eastern Ojibwe family. She shared with him the stories that became a primary source for Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. Through a network of marriages with her relatives (French, American and Ojibwe), other treaty signers joined the same extended family as Schoolcraft. Lyman Warren became a prominent fur trader and signed treaties with the Ojibwe from what is now Minnesota in 1842 and 1837. His son Truman signed Ojibwe treaties in 1855, 1863, 1864, and 1867. Lyman's son William, who signed an 1847 Ojibwe land cession treaty, forged an identity that straddled two worlds, writing an important history of the Ojibwe people and serving in the Minnesota Legislature.

William Warren's wife, Mathilda Aitkin (daughter of fur trader William Aitkin) also had a relationship with treaty signer Samuel Abbe. Aitkin (for whom Aitkin County is named) advocated the introduction of whiskey into the Indian trade; he signed Ojibwe treaties in 1842 and 1847. Abbe wend on to the join the board of directors of railroad and canal companies, and signed an Ojibwe treaty in 1863.